Beware of any religious organization with Family in its name

Chain the Dogma    April 11, 2011

Beware of any religious organization with Family in its name

by Perry Bulwer



That title may seem overly dramatic, but 'family' really is a loaded word today and not everyone promoting so-called family values is actually family-friendly or safe for children. This warning came too late for the St. Regis hotel in Vancouver that I recently discovered had donated rooms to a missionary family on their way to China. The hotel features them on their blog and Facebook page, without any apparent awareness that they are part of an extreme evangelical Christian cult that is responsible for tearing apart thousands of families, including my own, over the last four decades.

More on that particular family in a bit, but perhaps you are wondering if they are connected to one of the Family-named religious groups the Southern Poverty Law Center recently published an intelligence report on: 18 Anti-Gay Groups and Their Propaganda. The Center will be listing several of those groups as hate groups, including four with Family in their name: American Family Association, Family Research Council, Family Research Institute and Illinois Family Institute. A fifth group, Abiding Truth Ministries, has a website called Defend the Family, which promotes hate and bigotry. Online you will often find references to Defend the Family International, which is always a reference to that group, but commonly confused with The Family International, also known as the Children of God founded by David Berg. Likewise, The Family, the political cult in Washington is often confused with Berg's cult. I once saw a U.S. senator's website that was commenting on The Family political cult, but linked to The Family International's website.

Speaking of politics, a federal election is happening here in Canada right now and voters are being courted by the inevitable appeals and promises to families common to many electoral campaigns. Appealing to families makes political sense since almost everyone is or was part of a family, but not all politicians mean the same thing when they talk about families, which come in many forms. That fact seems to be lost in this election. Not only are the three main parties promoting family-friendly agendas, they have each used the same photo of a multicultural, middle-class family in their campaigns. Obviously, it is wise to be sceptical about such appeals and political promises in the midst of elections. Political promises are rarely kept, not all voters fit that demographic, and not all politicians mean the same thing when they talk about families.

In the U.S., President Obama recently concluded that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and the government would no longer defend that law in court. In response to that a  New York Times editorial stated: “Republicans like to cast themselves as the protectors of 'family values.' But ... [d]enying same-sex couples and their families the ... spousal benefits and protections granted other married couples is not a family-friendly policy. It is discrimination, plain and simple.” Someone should tell that to Stephen Harper, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada who is trying to win a majority government in this election.

Although same sex marriage became legal in Canada in 2005, Stephen Harper attempted to reopen a parliamentary debate on the issue after he was elected Prime Minister in 2006. That never happened, as he was leading a minority government until this latest election was called so did not have the clout to pull it off, but it showed that he obviously did not agree with the Supreme Court that same sex couples were families too, with the same equal rights as other families. I doubt he has changed his mind on that as he is a member of the fundamentalist, evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance.

The Family International, a.k.a. the Children of God, was founded by David Berg who previous to that was briefly a pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (strange bed-fellows, a pedophile cult leader and the Prime Minister of Canada). Partly because of negative publicity in the 1980s related to wide-spread child abuse, Berg, who died in 1994, changed the group's name to the more friendly sounding Family of Love, and then to The Family International. Berg's early followers were mostly single young adults and teens who were convinced by his dogmatic biblical literalism to leave their families to serve God in his 'Revolution for Jesus'. In those early days, Berg preached vehemently against the traditional family, using scripture to reinforce the idea that:

... God’s in the business of breaking up little selfish private worldly families to make of their yielded broken pieces a larger unit—one Family! He’s in the business of destroying the relationships of many wives in order to make them One Wife—God’s Wife—The Bride of Christ. God is not averse to breaking up selfish little families for His glory, to make of the pieces a much larger unselfish unit—the Whole Family—the entire Bride—the One Wife instead of many wives!

“One Wife” is one of The Family’s foundational doctrines, one of the most fundamental tenets of their theology. It is based on an internal document written by Berg to his followers, which remains required priority reading for new members and formed the basis for even more bizarre and controversial sexual doctrines. Far from institutionalizing the nuclear family, as one ignorant apologist falsely wrote about the group, The Family’s leadership has never hesitated to separate husbands and wives or manipulate the parent-child relationship. If The Family International places any importance at all in the nuclear family, it is only within the following context, described by Wendell W. Watters, M.D.:

The family plays powerful roles in human society. In addition to its nurturing and protective functions, the family is the primary agency for carrying out the socialization process by which social norms and values become incorporated into the character structure of the growing child. Indeed, so powerful is the family in human society that many revolutionary political movements have, in their initial stages, attempted to destroy its power to maintain the status quo, by appealing directly to children over the heads of their parents.

Jesus said: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). In another gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying: "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-­in-law" (Matt. 10:35). The Hitler youth movement was a major component of Nazi policy, while the early years of the Communist government in the former Soviet Union were marked by an attempt to appeal directly to the young. The present-day religious cults are noted for creating rifts between parents and their adolescent children. However, once a movement achieves its revolutionary goals, as in the case of Christianity and communism, it reverses this position and attempts once more to use the family as an ally in maintaining and extending its power.

Wendell Watters, M.D., Deadly Doctrine: Health, Illness and Christian God-Talk (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), 47-49.

That is exactly the pattern that Berg and his Christian evangelical cult followed. The only difference is that his 'Revolution for Jesus', which was supposed to herald the second coming of Jesus in 1993, with Berg and his Children of God as the vanguard, never materialized. Failed predictions do not stop evangelicals, however. After changing their name to The Family International, they now try to have it both ways. They continue to encourage teens and young adults to leave and even hate their families just like Jesus said, while at the same time promoting in their public relations websites and materials a false image of a child-friendly, family-focused missionary movement.

The blog for the St. Regis Hotel in Vancouver provides an example of that false image. The hotel management proudly proclaims it donated two nights stay for a missionary family with eight children on their way to China. The blog post describes their mission project: “EPIC (Empowering Parents in China) is a grassroots effort to provide Chinese parents with supplemental programs to help develop a more child-focused teaching methods...”. The post then tells us that: “Their mission is tied into the umbrella group The Family International...”. The blog post includes a photo of the family and to the uninformed they look so sweet and harmless, until you scratch the surface and begin looking a little deeper, which the hotel management failed to do. That is why my title warns not to trust religious groups with Family in their name.

Deceiving businesses has always been one of the main sources of support since the inception of The Family International as the Children of God. Even as Jesus Freaks in the early days, while most members were proselytizing on the streets, some specialized in soliciting directly from businesses. They would dress in business attire and use slick promotional materials and deceptive presentations, almost always featuring photos of children, to con companies into giving goods or money. They have had decades to perfect this fraud. Those donations are always used for the group's benefit, contrary to their usual claims that they are helping others. And even in cases where they do pass on some of the goods to others, they usually skim off the best for themselves first, which has been their practice all over the world. They then use the fact a company has donated to them as proof of their legitimacy for other companies they are targeting, or to win approval or favour from local authorities in their community.



I am certain that is what happened at the St. Regis Hotel. The manager was duped, with the help of smiling children, into helping them instead of being suspicious about a family that would take eight young children to China in the middle of the school year and with no apparent means of support other than begging. He apparently simply took their word that they were part of a legitimate group without doing any kind of background check, or if he did he didn't get past the first few online search results, which are the group's own websites. If he had looked just a little deeper he could have easily found all kinds of information warning about the terrible abuses of children The Family International is infamous for.

He also would have a difficult time finding any information at all about EPIC, the so-called grassroots project to provide child-focused teaching methods. First of all, the fact they call it a grassroots project ought to have aroused suspicion. If it has grassroots it probably has no transparency or accountability to anyone. Calling themselves a grassroots project is just another example of the obfuscation this group uses to deceive people about who they really are. It must have been enough for the manager to hear that they were tied to a large missionary group, but if he had looked into that group first he would have learned that The Family International, far from using child-focused teaching methods, denied true intellectual freedom to an entire generation of children who were forbidden to attend school or university. They were home-schooled by untrained teachers with an inadequate curriculum that was intended to indoctrinate rather than educate. But the manager did not do that background check and now his hotel is being used to promote, both on its blog andFacebook page, the activities of a notoriously abusive group founded by an alcoholic pedophile responsible for tearing apart thousands of families.



By the way, I posted two comments to the blog and emailed the manager twice, once with links to information about the group, and again without links to avoid any spam filter. Not only were my comments not published, but a comment most likely from another group member supporting that family was published. So far, the manager seems unconcerned that he is providing public relations cover for a child abusing organization. Perhaps more comments from the public on the hotel's blog and Facebook page will help convince him to stop promoting child abuse.


UPDATE: April 18, 2011

After I published this article the manager of St. Regis Hotel, Jeremy Roncoroni, finally contacted me by email to explain that the reason he did not approve the comments I submitted to the hotel's blog was because he did not want that blog to be a forum for discussion of the issues I raised. However, he did approve a positive comment about the group after he censored mine, and his email contained no indication that he would take further action. He merely excused himself by saying that "the family in question came to us through a personal request" as if that explained and excused everything. As I told him in reply, he seemed to be missing the point of my comments, which was to inform the hotel's management that they were providing support and positive public relations for a deceptive religious group with a long history of well documented child abuse. I did not think it was necessary for me to spell it out for him and ask him to remove the post from his blog, but because he had ignored the information I had sent him (he either did not understand or did not care) I did have to specifically ask him. After he received my reply, in which I provided personal details of my own abuse in and recovery from The Family International, he responded less than an hour later, simply stating, "the blog has been removed, thank you". He gave no indication he would do the same for the posting that appears on the hotel's Facebook page.


This article was found at:

http://chainthedogma.blogspot.com/2011/04/beware-of-any-religious-organization.html


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Child sacrifice: a review of the documentary All God's Children - the ultimate sacrifice

Chain The Dogma    December 22, 2009

by Perry Bulwer


Child sacrifice. The phrase may evoke images of Old Testament or New World rituals, or perhaps more modern images of misguided believers in 'faith healing' allowing children to die without even basic medical intervention that could have saved their lives. Those are examples of literal child sacrifice, where children are purposely killed or allowed to die because of superstitious belief that it will please a god. But the notion of 'child sacrifice' is also used metaphorically by some religious zealots indoctrinated to believe that parental duties are less important than their godly duties.

The documentary, All God's Children: the ultimate sacrifice, which examines abuses perpetrated against missionary kids isolated in a boarding school in Mamou, Guinea operated by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, opens with a discussion of the metaphor of a father sacrificing, or giving up, his son to save the world. It is such a powerful metaphor that it formed the foundation for three 'great' Abrahamic religions, and continues to compel mothers and fathers to break their natural parental bonds and abandon their children, to 'sacrifice' their kids in order to further their perceived, or more accurately, their misperceived spiritual mission. As one adult survivor of the horrendous abuses at the boarding school featured in the documentary asked his father: "How many African souls were worth my soul?" That was not a rhetorical question. The effect of religion related abuse on many survivors is a devasting loss of faith.

The sad tales of extreme emotional, psychological, physical, sexual, and spiritual child abuse recounted in the documentary are all too familiar to survivors of religion related child abuse, as well as to the health professionals who assist their recovery and the advocates who assist their search for justice and accountability. Those abuses all have similar characteristics, regardless of the particular religion, denomination, or sect, and survivors use similar words and phrases to describe that abuse, such as "mind control", "soul control" and "mental rape", each of which is heard in the documentary. The descriptions of corporal punishment, furthermore, clearly describe extreme physical abuse that was tantamount to torture and was intended to coerce, intimidate and humiliate, and could just as easily be describing abuse by Catholics, Baptists, the Hare Krishna, the Twelve Tribes, or the Children of God/The Family International. Regarding that latter group, they have an historical connection to the Christian and Missionary Alliance, but more on that later.

Just as vile as the physical and sexual abuses, perhaps even more so for some, are the accounts of psychological and spiritual abuses, or "soul control" as one interviewee put it. Children as young as 6, abandoned to the care of uncaring strangers, and experiencing separation shock were told to just get over any natural feelings and emotions. Siblings were prevented from comforting and supporting each other. The Alliance, and the boarding school they were virtual prisoners in, was the children's entire world, their 'family', which they were taught was the 'Body of Christ. They referred to all adults as aunts and uncles, who in the children's minds stood in place of God. As one survivor put it, when she was being violently raped by a staff member, it was the "face of God" that was causing her pain. In that totalitarian environment, where their guardians were their abusers, children could not turn to their teachers or dorm 'parents' for help or comfort. They were physically and spiritually threatened into silence, a silence that lasted long into their adult lives.

That long-term effect of child abuse is another way in which these survivor stories are so similar to those of other survivors. Many buried their shame, fear and anger for years, unable to express or process the abuse suffered during what must have been a terribly confusing childhood. After all, the children were experiencing the exact opposite of the gospel of love their parents were busy preaching to others. One survivor recounts that years later, back in the U.S., he laughed out loud when conversing with someone who said they had a happy childhood. The notion of a happy childhood was so oxymoronic to him that he actually thought the person was joking, as he had no idea it was possible to be a happy child. How sad is that? This same survivor also exhibits signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a common diagnosis for abuse survivors, when recounting with teary eyes and quivering voice how he struggled with suicidal thoughts, and how traumatic triggers, such as evangelical church hymns, immediately remind him of the "mental rape" he endured.

The documentary also reveals a similar pattern of recovery and advocacy that has occurred with other survivor groups. Emotions and psychological pain can only be bottled up for so long, and eventually some survivors begin connecting with each other, comparing stories, identifying abusers and organizing. For some, it was not until this process started that they began to recognize their childhood mistreatment for what it was, severe child abuse. However, any relief this initial recovery process may have brought them was tempered by the Alliance's response to their complaints, which was typical of most religious institutions confronted by allegations of systemic child abuse. For ten years a small group of survivors presented their complaints and allegations to the Alliance leadership, and for ten years they were ignored. A handful of survivors are shown protesting outside a general meeting of 4000 Alliance members. Except for one woman who stood with the protesters because her son had been sexually assaulted in one of the 12 boarding schools the Alliance operated, the survivors were completely ignored by Alliance members. For the survivors, this was simply adding insult to injury.

It was only after the survivors began a campaign to shame the Alliance in the media that any effort was made to address their complaints. The Alliance finally agreed to set up an internal Independent Commission of Inquiry. The survivor group, knowing how difficult it is for many to speak about their abuse, had hoped for at least 20 victims willing to testify, so were surprised when 80 agreed to do so. The Inquiry found that for several decades there had been consistent, systemic child abuse, and that it was not a result of just a few bad apples, which is a common excuse many abusive religious institutions give. So far, so good. The Alliance even agreed to set-up a weekend retreat for survivors of the Mamou school to help with their recovery, but that is as far as the Alliance has moved toward effectively addressing and correcting the specific issues raised by those survivors.

An Alliance leader, Peter Nanfelt, did offer an official apology at the time of that weekend retreat in which he expressed remorse and regret. However, as with similar apologies made on behalf of abusive religious groups, some survivors appearing in the documentary found the apology unsatisfying and self-serving. One referred to it as a "political" gesture by a "good politician", since Nanfelt had done everything he could, from 1987 onward, to stonewall any investigation into the abuse and keep it out of the media. The apology only came after the Alliance was forced into a corner. Some survivors saw it for what it was, an attempt to get forgiveness from them in order to let the Alliance off the hook and absolve them from any blame, without having to substantially address the issues that forced the apology. On the other hand, at the time of the apology some saw it as a significant step forward and a hopeful sign that healing and recovery was possible. However, other than the weekend retreat, the Alliance did nothing for the survivors.

Survivors took the next step in recovery and set up an advocacy website, Missionary Kids Safety Net (MKSN). In 2005 they met with the Alliance leadership and presented suggestions for changes in the organization that would protect the kids of missionaries. As of 2008, when the documentary was made, those advocates were still waiting for meaningful results from the Alliance. On the MKSN website they have posted documents that shed more light on the Alliance's inadequate resonse to this abuse scandal. For example, the Alliance issued another official apology in January 2009, which they posted on their website. If their first apology was so appropriate and effective, why would they need to issue another one? MKSN's response to this latest apology details some common faults in such institutional apologies. For example, here are just some of the criticisms:

"anger that the apology was not more specific"

"a sense of evasion of responsibility"

"continues to try to essentially coerce forgiveness from a situation where it is the last step in a process – not the first, or even an intermediate, step"

"apology was not signed by any individual Alliance official"

"nor did it go out as a personal message to individual survivors who are known to the Alliance"

"extremely limited scope of its distribution. The Alliance evidently thinks that a carefully worded apology in its in-house publications, in some way neutralizes the issue"

"the chosen manner of distribution for the apology means it will not reach a large percentage of abuse survivors"

"I expect that the Alliance now will assert it has done enough with regard to MK abuse issues. As we’ve said before, unless and until the C&MA reaches out comprehensively to all former students, submits allegations to a truly independent investigative process, and meaningfully engages a broader spectrum of the survivor community, gestures such as this will not have the impact you intend."

Sadly, this issuing of multiple, self-serving apologies for the same offences is nothing new. The Alliance seems to have copied this tactic from the leaders of the cult Children of God, now known as The Family International, who have issued numerous apologies for similar child abuses as those documented in All God's Children. One survivor of that cult abuse critiques those apologies and her criticisms are very similar to those above by the MKSN advocates.

I purposely make a connection here between the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Children of God, now The Family International, because the founder of that cult, David Berg, had been a minister with the Alliance for a few years in the late 1940s and early 50s. He wrote that his mother's evangelical faith healing ministry began with her own healing from a back injury after her husband was handed a tract written by A.B. Simpson, the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Years later, after working in his mom's ministry, Berg became a minister with the Alliance and was placed at Valley Farms, Arizona. He was eventually expelled from the Alliance over doctrinal disputes and sexual misconduct with a teen employee of the church. A little more than ten years later, on the beaches of California, Berg began attracting followers to his extremist brand of evangelism from amongst the hippies and unaffiliated Jesus freaks and an abusive cult was born, one might say, from a 'seed' planted by the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Berg's cult quickly became known for its manipulative, abusive tactics, and accusations of 'brain-washing' were frequently made against it, what survivors featured in the documentary might call "mental rape" or "soul control". However, it wasn't until children began being born and raised in totalitarian environments that the worst of the abuses began occurring. It is not surprising that the systemic child abuses detailed in All God's Children are in many respects the same as those within the Children of God/The Family International. Christian dogma, such as 'sacrificing' or giving up your children in order to do God's work, adhered to by both groups, is directly responsible for many of the systemic abuses committed within them.

And one final note on this connection. On the front page of the Christian and Missionary Alliance website, they offer this description of their organization: "The Alliance is a unique missionary denomination—a maverick movement..." That language is eerily similar to language used by the current leaders of The Family International to describe Berg's extreme doctrines. In a press release they describe the group's desire, not to distance themselves from abusive doctrines, but instead to preserve the group's "... uniqueness and unconventional doctrines". Too bad that the abuses these bad religions cause are not unique as well, instead of being all too common.

For more information on All God's Children: the ultimate sacrifice, a documentary by Scott Solary & Luci Westphal, visit their website at: http://www.allgodschildrenthefilm.com/

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The above article is also posted at:
https://chainthedogma.blogspot.com/2010/10/child-sacrifice-review-of-documentary.html

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